and a helicopter tour of the Grand
Canyon), and was found to be in pos-
session of ten still images of child por-
nography to boot? He was arrested
after an investigation by D.O.I. in
2003. How about Natarajan (Raju)
Venkataram and Rosa Abreu, arrested
in 2005 for stealing millions of dollars
of New York's 9/11 money?
D. 0.1. receives around fifteen thou-
sand tips and complaints a year now,
and it deals with all of them, no matter
how small. The department also does
preëmptive corruption investigation,
conducting background checks on pro-
spective city workers above a certain
level, and into companies awarded
large city contracts. The agency was
founded in 1873, as a consequence of
outrage over the Tweed Courthouse,
known as the Palace of Plunder. The
excesses were so ridiculous (a plasterer
was paid a hundred and thirty-three
thousand dollars to do two days' work)
that the Tweed Ring-Mayor A.
Oakey (Elegant Oakey) Hall, Comp-
troller Richard (Slippery Dick) Con-
nolly, Chamberlain Peter (Brains)
Sweeny, and William (Boss) Tweed-
was finally routed, and it became clear
that the city needed a system to make
sure that such a thing never happened
again. It took a while to figure out how
to do this-more than a hundred years.
The inspectors general used to report
to the departments they were supposed
to be investigating, but, after a series of
scandals in the nineteen-eighties,
Mayor Ed Koch placed them all, ex-
cept for the Police Department, un-
der D.O.I.
How much power D.O.I. has, and
how much it gets done, varies hugely,
depending on the personality of the
mayor. Some old hands claim that the
early nineties was the golden age of
D.O.I., because Mayor David Dinkins
was sufficiently honest, passive, and
clueless to let the agency do what it
wanted. Before Dinkins, mayors had
appointed and dismissed D.O.!. com-
missioners at their pleasure, which
made for a rather tootWess organiza-
tion. But in the early nineties D.O.I.
uncovered a welfare scam in which a
ring of women, using wigs and makeup
and fake birth certificates, posed as
hundreds of welfare recipients, and
stole about forty-five million dollars
from the city. D.O.!. arrested a group
of sanitation inspectors who were de-
manding cash, prostitutes, and ziti.
They arrested half the citj s taxi inspec-
tors. In Operation Yellow Bird, they
got the N.Y.P.D. and other agencies to
lend them East Asian men and had
them pose as passengers flying into
Kennedy Airport from Tokyo in order
to bust cabdrivers who ripped them off
They infiltrated a gang of parking-
meter attendants who had made off
with around four million quarters in
two years.
One of D.O.I.'s finest hours was
uncovering the second of the two great
Parking Violations Bureau scandals
before it had a chance to happen. In
the eighties, a contract for the collec-
tion of many millions in fines was
granted to a company called Datacom
Systems Corporation, whose president
had agreed to pay bribes to the Qyeens
borough president and the deputy di-
rector of the Parking Violations Bu-
reau. The exposure of all this, as pros-
ecuted by Rudy Giuliani, the U.S.
Attorney at the time, caused the
Qyeens borough president to com-
mit suicide and sullied Mayor Koch.
D.O.I. missed this scandal entirely,
squandering a lead that it had been
offered. Just a few years later, Datacom
applied, with breathtaking chutzpah,
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for another Parking Violations Bureau
contract under a different name. The
contract was awarded, and when this
was exposed the scandal, among other
things, helped bring down Dinkins.
(A mayor who permits D.O.I. to in-
vestigate corruption freely risks being
tainted by whatever it digs up. Giu-
liani did not make the same mistake
when he became mayor-he hired an
old friend to run D.O.I. and kept him
close. )
This high drama is, however, the
exception. Much of D.O.I.'s daily
work consists of rounding up people
whose crimes are so small, so unneces-
sary, and so amazingly stupid that
their capture is an act of mercy. A few
years ago, the owner of an upstate
diner offered a thousand dollars to a
D.E.P. employee to overlook his bro-
ken septic system. The employee was
insulted and said so, rejected the
money, went so far as to photograph
the money in front of the diner owner,
went out to the parking lot, and called
D.O.I. An hour and a half later, D.O.!.
sent to the diner two investigators pre-
tending to be D.E.P. employees; the
diner owner did not suspect them and
offered his bribe once again. And then
there was the state assemblywoman
Diane Gordon. D.O.I. had busted a
developer for offering bribes, and the
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